Police patrols better than high-tech

Plumley Village and Belmont, Elizabeth, Laurel and Prospect streets don't naturally come to mind when one speaks of the Shrewsbury Street neighborhood.

Yet those were the names thrown out by Gary Vecchio to rationalize spending $434,000 in CSX mitigation money on a gunfire-detection system in the Shrewsbury neighborhood and parts of Grafton Street and the Canal District. Another $35,000 will be used to set up a surveillance camera in the Grafton Street area.

I suspect the residents of the depressed areas mentioned by Mr. Vecchio would benefit more from programs designed to fight poverty rather than from cameras and acoustic surveillance systems, but, unlike Mr. Vecchio, I am not a member of an advisory committee appointed by the city manager to oversee the expenditure of about $2 million in CSX mitigation money.

"It is a wonderful project that will be beneficial to the neighborhood and the police department, and will make the city a lot safer," was how Mr. Vecchio described the hard sell that ShotSpotter company officials and Worcester police laid on his committee, which voted 5-1 to approve the project.

Police Chief Gary Gemme concurs with the company's assessment of its product, noting it will allow his department to "apprehend offenders, locate crime scenes and collect evidence more efficiently.

"The technology will also allow the Worcester Police to collect more data on where gunshots are originating from and allow us to deploy personnel in those locations where and when they are needed most," he said. "Investing in this technology has the potential to reduce crime and improve quality of life."

I wonder what happened to noise abatement? Wasn't that the big concern of residents who live around the CSX freight yard?

The city manager and the City Council will decide the matter, but before they do, they ought to know that Trenton, N.J., law enforcement officials also sang the system's praises when they implemented it in 2009, and held onto it despite almost two-thirds of the 1,500 detections over a 12-month period being false alarms, or what Trenton police officials dubbed "wild goose chases."

Trenton finally gave up on the expensive system last year when it failed to pick up the shooting of a man who was left lying in the street for more than five hours.

This year Newark decided not to expand its $80,000-a-year ShotSpotter program for several reasons. Since 2010, 75 percent of the gunshot alerts have been false alarms, but police are often deployed to the location anyway, just in case there is a shooter. In the past three years, gunshot-detection sensors in Newark went off 3,632 times, and 17 shooters were arrested on scene. Apparently, without an accompanying camera, the system is not as effective as it is trumpeted to be.

This tells us that the nearly half-million dollars the city is being asked to spend on this program is just the ante to get in the game.

The real cost will come when the city seeks to expand the program in future years. Here is the kicker: The CSX mitigation funding source will end in three years. After that the city will need to find an alternate funding source, and chances are highly likely that source will be the taxpayers.

Allen Fletcher, who represents the Canal District on the advisory committee and who cast the lone vote against the surveillance system, believes that extra beat cops would provide a higher, more effective level of public safety response in the targeted areas.